Community Oral Care Stories: Part 1

6/8/24- This was the 6th week of working at Community Oral Care, and I worked at the same nursing home that I usually worked at. This time, we needed to do a survey to help with our research paper we're trying to write, and that added a new element to the normal task of cleaning dentures. So, starting with the first floor, my siblings and I collected, cleaned, and returned the dentures to the denture wearers, but now presented them with a survey either during the cleaning period of after we returned their dentures. I had mixed experience with these new surveys because these elderly people can be unpredictable at times.

I surveyed 3 people yesterday; two went well, one went bad. The first woman I surveyed was one I got close to. She was the very first person I ever cleaned dentures for, and when I asked her to answer some quick questions, she gladly agreed. She always made jokes to me before, and she made to make some more jokes to me this time as well. Feeling great from this positive experience with her, I went to the next patient. I actually didn't clean this patient's dentures; I asked her the questions because I was the only one available at that time. Let's just say this experience went not as well as the first one. This elderly lady is really old, and I don't think she could really understand me well. Oh, and she has a temper. When I asked if I could ask her a few questions, she didn't exactly say no but didn't exactly say yes either. So I just went along with my questions. During the questioning, I could tell that something was wrong; she didn't fully understand my questions, but I couldn't understand what she was speaking! I could only hear one-word responses, that's it. Her speech was a bit mumbled, and it was hard for me to hear her (and probably hard for her to hear me because of her age). When I was almost done, she just got really mad at me and told me to leave her alone. I had no idea she was mad, I only thought that she had trouble hearing me. Well, I just went back to the cleaning room, defeated and dejected over my failure. The last person I interviewed was someone I wasn't that close with, but I had heard that she was kind of cranky. At first, when I came to get her dentures, she was rather cranky, but when it came to surveying her, she was surprisingly nice! I guess she was just one of those people that seem mean on the outside but is nice on the inside (or maybe she was just nice to me in that moment). Either way, I left her room feeling happy that I managed to get the "cranky lady" to speak nicely to me.

Overall, I think the surveying and denture cleaning went pretty well. As my brother told me afterward, the surveying allowed for me to connect to the denture wearers more intimately than before. Previously, I only cleaned dentures (in a separate room) and returned them, leaving no personal connection to most of the people in the nursing home. But now, the surveys allowed for me to know more about these elderly people, and hopefully, brighten up their day as well.